President Donald Trump offered support Wednesday to the Orange County leaders and activists who are rebelling against the State of California’s “sanctuary state” laws and siding with the federal government against them.
Trump tweeted the morning after the Orange County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to condemn the state’s “sanctuary state” laws, and to join the U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit that seeks to overturn those laws on the basis of the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
The president said:
The revolt has been sweeping Orange County ever since Attorney General Jeff Sessions appeared in the state earlier this month as his department filed its lawsuit in a federal district court in Sacramento.
The federal government is challenging three laws: the Immigrant Worker Protection Act (HB 450), the Inspection and Review of Facilities Housing Federal Detainees law (AB 103), and the California Values Act (SB 54).
Last week, the city council of Los Alamitos voted to defy the “sanctuary state” laws and to join the federal government’s lawsuit. Other cities and government bodies in Orange County are considering following suit. (Over a dozen Republican-led states have also joined the lawsuit on the federal government’s side.)
This week, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department decided to post information about the release dates of all inmates in its jails, including illegal aliens, so that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) would be able to pick up those slated for deportation. ICE Acting Director Tom Homan praised the department in a statement on Tuesday.
Interestingly, the president’s tweets marked one of the few times he has commented recently on the “sanctuary state” controversy in California. He was relatively quiet regarding Sessions’s challenge to the state, though several days later he blasted the state government while on a visit to the border wall prototypes near San Diego.
Trump’s intervention will encourage the revolt in Orange County, a traditionally conservative area that Hillary Clinton carried narrowly in the 2016 presidential election.
Democrats hope to pick up several seats in the area, as a crucial component of their plan to flip the U.S. House in the 2018 midterm elections. But the surge in activism against California’ “sanctuary state” laws could complicate those efforts, as may a scheduled referendum on the state’s new gas tax, as well as a recall of a local Democratic State Senator who voted for it.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He was named to Forward’s 50 “most influential” Jews in 2017. He is the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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